Program note:

Co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall especially for Paul Hillier and Theatre of Voices, David Lang's ''the little match girl passion'' was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Music.

Setting Hans Christian Andersen's fable in the format of Bach's St Matthew Passion, Lang elevates the suffering of the little match girl with his poignant, evocative music. Lang's music makes a big impact with small forces. The piece is scored for only four voices and a few percussion instruments, played by the singers. They sing the sad story of a little girl who freezes to death selling matches on the street during a cold winter's night. In notes Lang wrote to accompany the Carnegie Hall premiere last October, he says he was drawn to Andersen's story because of how opposite aspects of the plot played off each other. ''The girl's bitter present is locked together with the sweetness of her past memories,'' Lang says. ''Her poverty is always suffused with her hopefulness. There's a kind of naïve equilibrium between suffering and hope.'' Lang was also intrigued by the religious allegory he saw beneath the surface of the story, and he found inspiration in the music of his favorite composer, J.S. Bach.
- Harmonia Mundi website

Program Notes
the little match girl passion
words and music by david lang
after h.c. andersen, h.p. paull, picander and saint matthew

I wanted to tell a story. A particular story, in fact: the story of The Little Match Girl, by the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. The original is ostensibly for children, and it has that shocking combination of danger and morality that many famous children’s stories do. A poor young girl, whose father beats her, tries unsuccessfully to sell matches on the street, is ignored, and freezes to death. Through it all she somehow retains her Christian purity of spirit, but it is not a pretty story.

What drew me to The Little Match Girl is that the strength of the story lies not in its plot but in the fact that all its parts – the horror and the beauty - are constantly suffused with their opposites. The girl’s bitter present is locked together with the sweetness of her past memories, her poverty is always suffused with her hopefulness. There is a kind of naïve equilibrium between suffering and hope.

There are many ways to tell this story. One could convincingly tell it as a story about faith, or as an allegory about poverty. What has always interested me, however, is that Andersen tells this story as a kind of parable, drawing a religious and moral equivalency between the suffering of the poor girl and the suffering of Jesus. The girl suffers, is scorned by the crowd, dies and is transfigured. I started wondering what secrets could be unlocked from this story if one took its Christian nature to its conclusion and unfolded it, as Christian composers have traditionally done in musical settings of the Passion of Jesus.

The most interesting thing about how the Passion story is told is that it can include texts other than the story itself. These texts are the reactions of the crowd, penitential thoughts, statements of general sorrow or shock or remorse. These are devotional guideposts, the markers for our own responses to the story, and they have the effect of making the audience more than spectators to the sorrowful events onstage.

In a traditional Passion these responses can have a huge range – in Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion these extra texts range from famous chorales that his congregation was expected to sing along with to completely invented characters, such as the ‘’Daughter of Zion’’ and the ‘’Chorus of Believers.’’ The Passion format – the telling of a story while simultaneously commenting upon it – has the effect of placing us in the middle of the action, and it gives the narrative a powerful inevitability.

My piece is called the little match girl passion and it sets Hans Christian Andersen's story The Little Match Girl in the format of Bach's Saint Matthew Passion, interspersing Andersen's narrative with my versions of texts of the crowd and character responses in the Bach. The libretto is by me, after texts by HC Andersen, HP Paull (the first translator of the story into English, in 1872), Picander (the nom de plume of Christian Friedrich Henrici, the librettist of the Bach), and the Gospel according to Saint Matthew.

The word ‘’passion’’ comes from the Latin word for suffering. There is no Bach in my piece and there is no Jesus - rather the suffering of the Little Match Girl has been substituted for Jesus', (I hope) elevating her sorrow to a higher plane.

the little match girl passion was co-commissioned by the
Carnegie Hall Corporation and The Perth Theater and Concert Hall. The World premiere was given by Theatre of Voices, conducted by Paul Hillier in Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, New York City on October 25, 2007.

The commission of this work was made possible with public funds
from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

the little match girl passion is dedicated to my wife, Suzanne Bocanegra, whose favorite story is The Little Match Girl.

for love is strong (after the song of songs)

words and music by david lang
after the song of songs

for love is strong (after the song of songs) is a setting of a text I made by finding certain things in the Song of Songs. The original text is of course the most passionate and erotic of the ancient Jewish books, and it is always strange to encounter it in the Bible. What is such carnality doing in such a holy place? How can this possibly be a spiritual text? Although it describes the relationship of a man and a woman, the Jewish tradition says that it uses the relationship between lovers as a metaphor for one’s relationship to God. The entire book is not only a metaphor, but it is made of metaphors. What is your love like? Like wine. What is your name like? Like oil pouring forth. How black am I? Like the tents of Kedar. Everything in the book begins with a comparison, leading you to the things you cannot see or feel or know by comparing them to those things you can. For my text I took every comparison in the original – every metaphor, every simile – and listed them, beginning with the word ‘like.’ The title comes from one of the last of these comparisons – ‘’for love is strong as death,’’ which seems altogether too terrifying to be only about relationships between people.

for love is strong (after the song of songs) was written for this recording.

I lie

words by joseph rolnick
music by david lang

I lie was commissioned by the California vocal ensemble Kitka, in part with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. I have a long history with this ensemble, having worked with them on music for the American Conservatory Theater’s production of the play Hecuba, directed by Carey Perloff and starring Olympia Dukakis. Kitka is an all woman group and it concentrates on music that comes out of the various folk traditions of Eastern Europe, so when they asked me to write a kind of ‘‘modern folk song’ it seemed natural to me to take the text of an old Yiddish song and give it new music. I chose this particular text because it has a darkly expectant feeling about it. It isn’t about being happy or sad or miserable or redeemed; rather, it is about waiting for happiness or sadness or misery or redemption. As is the case in many Yiddish songs, something as ordinary as a girl waiting for her lover can cast many darker, more deeply beautiful shadows.

I lie is dedicated to Lisa Moore and Martin Bresnick, on the occasion of their wedding.

evening morning day

words and music by david lang
after genesis, chapter 1

I wanted to make a piece about the creation story but I didn't want to highlight one religion's or culture's narrative over another. It was important for me to try to find something universal, something present in all stories, or common to all cultures. I hit upon the idea of making a kind of checklist of everything that needed to be created to get the world to this point, without each individual culture's stories or myths or exoticisms. I went back to the first chapter of Genesis, to see what I could get out of my own culture's story, and I stripped away all the descriptions, adjectives, connectors and motivators. All that is left of Genesis in my text are the nouns, leaving a dispassionate list of everything created, in the order in which it is mentioned.

evening morning day was commissioned by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Dianne Berkun, Director.

again (after ecclesiates)

words and music by david lang
after ecclesiastes

again (after ecclesiates) is a setting of a few lines from the beginning of the Book of Ecclesiastes, freely adapted by me. Ecclesiastes is a Hebrew prophet (in Hebrew his name is Kohelet) and his book is traditionally read during the harvest holiday of Sukkot. Kohelet moves powerfully from the cycling of the seasons to other endless natural and human cycles, creating a strange equilibrium of hope and futility. In my setting I wanted to make a piece that might convey the weariness of all of these endless cycles, concentrating on the weight of things repeating again. And again.

again (after ecclesiates) was commissioned and premiered by the Cerddorion Vocal Ensemble in New York City, Kristina Boerger, Director.

Program note:

Reviews

David Lang, alongside Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon, founded Bang on a Can in 1987 for the same reason most contemporary composers organize ensembles-- to hear someone play their music. Twenty-two years later, ''Bang on a Can'' has become as much a movement as an organization, having gathered forces and expanded in all directions with a tenacity that would impress the Wu-Tang Clan. Despite their countless offshoots, side projects, collaborations, and a growing number of disciples, Lang, Wolfe, and Gordon remain the beating heart of BoAC, and their shared aesthetic has come to define a wide slice of the American contemporary classical scene.

The three tend to subsume their individual efforts into the collective, so it is enlightening and refreshing to hear when one of them breaks off on their own. Lang's music, released mostly on the BoAC's Cantaloupe label, does arguably the clearest job of defining the ''Bang on a Can'' sound of the three. If we're sticking with the Wu-Tang analogy, then Lang is the GZA figure, the one who most deftly negotiates all of the quirks and contradictions that make BoAC's world worthwhile and interesting. Pierced is a further refinement on that world, a place steeped in both the New York rock and the minimalism of the 70s without being overly indebted to either, an ingenious meld of film-score ambience, rock propulsion, and minimalist textures.

Lang's pieces come in two basic varieties: rippling, liquid, and quietly restless (''My Very Empty Mouth'', ''Sweet Air'', both off of 2003's excellent Child ) and chattering, agitated, and bustling. The works on Pierced fall mostly in the latter category, which can make it a tougher listen. The title track, for example, is a near-exhausting exercise in rhythmic rug-pulling, a hard downbeat switching accents every few bars while strings shudder and groan like a leaky barge and a piano endlessly hammers a low note. The piece lurches in place for almost 14 minutes, an equal parts maddening and absorbing shell game of ''where's-the-beat?'' ''Cheating, Lying, Stealing'', an older work, has a similarly spiky hide, bristling with nervously stuttering piano, low bass-clarinet blats, and feedback squalls, all scored by the bangs and clunks of scrapyard-metal percussion. It resembles the sort of bracing urban chaos that Industrial Age composers like George Antheil sought to capture in his 1924 Ballet Mecanique, except that here the machinery has rusted and grown creaky with age.

There is a long, mournful moment of repose, though, in Lang's startling reworking of the Velvet Underground's ''Heroin''. Art-rock legends and classical composers often make dicey bedfellows, but Lang wisely avoids trying to win cool contests against Lou Reed. Maintaining the original's trancelike quality, he ditches everything else, recasting the song for the hauntingly pure-voiced singer/composer Theo Bleckmann and a single cellist. The result resembles a cross between an English Renaissance ballad and a Chet Baker-style torch song, stripping away the thin veil of bravado and leaving only piercing sadness. The only work that directly references rock music, it's also the most ''traditional''-sounding piece of classical music on the album, a canny switch-up that demonstrates how comfortable Lang is in the cross-genre slipstream. The album isn't perfect-- there are a few dead patches towards the end-- but Lang, who won the Pulitzer in 2008 for his Little Match Girl Passion, remains the rare Downtown composer who has managed to enter the Uptown world of big-name commissions and hefty grants with both his spirit and voice intact.

— Jayson Greene, Pitchfork, March 20, 2009

Dark, mordant and rhythmically relentless, ''Pierced'' is the most exciting new work in years from Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang. It's a concerto for trio and string orchestra, but the piece doesn't bother with any of the usual concerto give-and-take. Instead, Lang sets his forces in quivery, almost hostile juxtaposition; all they can agree on is the recurring downbeat. The results are irresistible, the most forceful thrill of several to be had from this explosive disc. Also in the lineup are ''Heroin,'' Lang's chillingly tender remake of the Velvet Underground classic into a postmodern art song, the vivid ''Lying, Cheating, Stealing'' and the dynamically beautiful ''How to Pray.'' The spirit that comes through in all these pieces - edgy, aggressive, thoughtful and ironic - is Lang's distinctive addition to the musical landscape.

-- San Francisco Chronicle, Joshua Kosman, February 2009

Program note:

Dark, emotional and exquisitely beautiful, David Lang's disc Elevated has premiere recordings of three works. Taken together, these pieces create a world in which consonance fights dissonance, hope struggles against hopelessness, and simple melodies are constantly beset by gravity, weight and decay.

The enclosed DVD captures collaborations between Lang and three giants of contemporary visual arts:

* pioneer William Wegman,
* experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison (Decasia)
* conceptual artist Matt Mullican.

Lang used his pieces as a way to open up different pathways to these artists and their work, setting an early (and very controversial) Wegman video to music, and giving music to Morrison and Mullican for them to build new visuals around. The results are stunning, moody and sometimes very disturbing.

Program note:

David Lang follows his highly-acclaimed Cantaloupe debut The Passing Measures with this major new work for seven musicians. Child is a powerful meditation on childhood and memory. Sweet and simple on the surface, gentle musical fragments float by, leaving faint traces of darkness in their wake. Written in five separate parts for some of Europe's finest groups, Child is recorded here by the Italian ensemble Sentierri Selvaggi.

''Boldly realized snakes its intriguing way over varied emotional turf, with melancholic irresolution in the mix. Sheer musical energy and spiritual inquiry hover over the proceedings.'' -- Josef Woodard, Los Angeles Times

Program note:

Painfully slow and achingly beautiful, The Passing Measures, for bass clarinet, amplified orchestra and women's voices, is an ambient and emotionally charged meditation on the passing of time.

''Sits and shimmers gently, like a jeweled pendant turning very slowly in the light.'' - Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle

This heartfelt, mournful piece, a wordless, 45-minute quasi-concerto for women's chorus, bass clarinet, and amplified orchestra, is a welcome surprise from a composer whose always deft and subtle work has often seemed ironic and arch. The clarinettist Marty Ehrlich, the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, and members of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra Chorus, conducted by Paul Herbert, provide a dignified performance, giving gentle life to the work's lustrous waves of color. [This is one of the] best classical albums of 2001.
- Russell Platt, The New Yorker

Program note:

''Are You Experienced?'' is the title of a famous Jimi Hendrix song that became one of the anthems of the 1960s counterculture; and it became the title, as well, of the late guitarist's first album, a strikingly original work of its time and, now, a pop classic. It is the title of a piece, written two decades later by David Lang; and it has become the title of this, the first recording devoted to the works of a striking young American composer who came to prominence in the 1980s. But, more importantly, it is a question.

David Lang has a penchant for provocative titles. He called an orchestra piece commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra, ''Eating Living Monkeys.'' ''International Business Machine'' was written for the Boston Symphony Orchestra; ''Bonehead,'' for the American Composers Orchestra; ''Aliens Kidnapped Me and Stole My Blood,'' for Stanford University. And there is this collection's chamber orchestra score, ''Spud.''

An element of whimsy inspired these titles, along with the predictable irreverence of youth towards the often smug reverence in which classical institutions are held by society. But all are works, as are the remaining scores included here ''Orpheus Over and Under'' and ''Illumination Rounds'' that question modern experience in a way that is new for new music. Each work serves as a musical analog to our immediate world and feelings, and a music results that is at once formally rigorous and stylistically hip. There is no name yet for this kind of music that has both the discipline of modernism and the relevance of postmodernism.

Lang's restlessness and his taste for the ridiculous can also be heard in ''Are You Experienced?'' - which was commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts for David Stock and the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble in 1987 and revised two years later. The piece starts off almost as a joke, the evoking of Jimi Hendrix's psychedelically fluid electric guitar with its absurd antithesis, the electric tuba. And Lang's dramatic score for narrator, solo tuba and ensemble - which is a reaction to, rather than an arrangement or appropriation of, the original song - explores the darker antithesis to Hendrix's hedonistic ''experience'' with sex and drugs. Hendrix's song is the experience of loosing your mind to pleasure; Lang's is about simply loosing your mind.

Comprised of six sections (''On being hit on the head,'' ''Dance,'' ''On being hit on the head (reprise),'' ''On hearing the voice of God,'' ''Drop,'' ''On hearing the siren's song''), the narrator's text, a fantasy on images from Hendrix's song, goes from what first seems a Three-Stooges dancing bewilderment following a knock on the bean, to disturbing mystical delusions, to scary returns to childhood (here ''Drop'' is the command school children in the 1950s practiced in case of nuclear attack), to utter confusion.

Musically, Lang's score follows this progression through a dissolution of order. The jarring hit on the head (groups of repeated notes alternating on and off the beat) leads to a raucous, rocking dance of fast, repeated 16th-notes in rapid short crecendos culminating in a riotous electric tuba solo encased in trademark Hendrix feedback. Following the reprise of the first section, where it becomes apparent the hit on the head was serious, not funny, the music becomes more rhythmically fragmented, long notes dominate. The tuba wails and breaths heavily, while drums beat in the fourth section; the fifth ends in a nuclear bang that leaves the scattered music of the ending in its wake.

Written in 1989 for the dual piano team, Double Edge, ''Orpheus Over and Under'' is the flip side of ''Are You Experienced?'' a subdued, meditation in two sections, Aria and Chorale, on the experience of loss. Lang says that his inspiration for the piece came from a desire to find in music the equilibrium between hope and loss that is conveyed in the Orpheus myth. ''Orpheus first loses Eurydice above ground,'' the composer wrote in a program note, ''regains her below ground, and loses her finally when crossing the horizon, where over and under meet.''

Throughout the score, both pianos play in constant tremolos that shimmer like mirages on the distant horizon, the first piano keeping to a high soprano range, the second eventually expanding down into the base during the aria, and into the stratospheres at the end of the chorale. Each section - the first melodic, the second harmonic - begins with a narrow restricted range of notes that is slowly and subtlely intensified in feeling through expansion of register, pitch and dynamic, welling up at the end of the Chorale into a climax that, like that in ''Are You Experienced?'', leaves shards flying, but is, in this case, cathartic.

''Spud,'' a 1986 commission from the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, is, you guessed it, potato-shaped. Liking to think up ways to organize music that avoids conventional organic forms, growing from small motivic seed into grand structure, Lang here models the score on the potato, which the composer writes, ''begins its life at its most coherent, losing its shape and substance with the growth of its sprouts. The sprouts will, of course, become other potato plants, but, seen from the point of view of the potato, they are agents of death and decay. A piece based on the life of a potato, such as my composition ''Spud,'' might begin with the coherence of all musical voices and move towards their independence, much in the way that a series of variations might bear successively less resemblance to their theme.''

The musical dissolution is fairly straightforward, beginning with a plump melodic line in the winds punctuated by sharp, syncopated string chords. But as the various shoots in the musical potato start to protrude this tidy opening, surprising conflicts between the different instrumental groups occur. Lang says that much of his orchestral music is based around something he once noticed in Federico Fellini's short film, ''Orchestra Rehearsal,'' namely that left to their own devices orchestra members would rather argue than play together in harmony.

''Illumination Rounds,'' for violin and piano from 1982, is the earliest piece on this collection and also the most directly inspired by outside experience. Writing for Juilliard students, who, Lang says, were particularly excited by the physical nature and technology of playing their instruments, the composer modeled the roles between violin and piano on a type of bullet that was used in the Vietnam War. After being fired, an illumination round leaves a phosphorescent residue in the air, allowing gunners to aim by following a vapor trail. Likewise, in this score of violent gestures and fierce counterpoint, the violin and piano trade off being either image or echo, while the result experienced has something of both the exhilaration and terror of combat.

Mark Swed

Program note:

Lost Objects is a musical exploration of the meaning of memory. With the spine of a baroque oratorio layered with the muscle of modern times, it is a powerful monument to the loss of people, things, rituals, ideas.

In their second major collaborative performance project, genre-defying composers Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe team up with polyphonic writer Deborah Artman to work a strange and beautiful alchemy of text and sound. The baroque virtuosity of the legendary Concerto Köln is challenged and stretched by the hard-edged electric Bang on a Can Lost Objects Ensemble and the avant-turntables of DJ Spooky. In the same way that oratorios such as Handel's Messiah were intended to be staged, the 3 vocal soloists and 30 voice chorus of LOST OBJECTS inhabit a mythic and beautiful stage world, under the direction of the acclaimed, award-winning director François Girard (''32 Short Films About Glenn Gould,'' ''The Red Violin'').

The result is LOST OBJECTS, a haunting, hallucinatory and humane musictheater piece for baroque orchestra, rock ensemble (electric guitar, electric bass, keyboard and drums), live DJ remix, solo voices and choir. The unique weave of sounds combines the resonance of animal gut and wood with the ethereal blend of soprano and countertenor voices mixed with the edgy force of amplified rock instruments and drums. ''LOST OBJECTS is a prayer hall, a hymn but also an invention,'' writes Ms. Artman. ''There is a narrative, somewhat sacred, but it is a fractured meditation. In the tenuous and hurried climate of the times we live in now, LOST OBJECTS asks us to pause and consider the grace bestowed upon each thing, person, animal and idea, the ordinary and the not-so-ordinary lost objects of our shared and vanishing culture.''

Creators
Music by Michael Gordon, David Lang, Julia Wolfe
Libretto by Deborah Artman
Directed by François Girard
Stage Design by François Seguin
Conducted by Daniel Reuss
Sound Design by Jody Elff
Lighting Design by Jane Cox
Projection Design by Peter Flaherty

Performers
Bang on a Can Lost Objects Ensemble
Concerto Köln
Elizabeth Keusch, soprano
Andrew Watts, Daniel Bubeck, countertenors
Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky

Produced by Bang on a Can

Review
...a score that examines loss as an inevitable consequence of historical development and as an enduring subject of human fascination...It is a huge canvas, and the composers fill it with a rhythmically assertive post-Minimalist score, written for an orchestra of Baroque-period instruments, a rock band, a chorus and soloists, and a D.J., who creates live electronic mixes as interludes.

—Allan Kozinn, The New York Times

Program note:

LIMITED EDITION CD + DELUXE 48-PAGE FULL-COLOR BOOK Chock full of drawings from acclaimed New Yorker cartoonist and Pantheon Books author Ben Katchor

The Carbon Copy Building is a dynamic and visually stunning trip through the gritty underside of urban life. Words and drawings by celebrated New Yorker comic-strip artist and recent MacArthur Grant recipient Ben Katchor are brought vividly to life by music from Bang on a Can Co-Artistic Directors Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe.

Rock band meets opera, The Carbon Copy Building is a full-length work for four singers and winds, keys, guitar, and drums; and is the first major collaborative work from the Bang on a Can Co-Artistic Directors. The revolutionary show won the Village Voice 2000 OBIE Award for Best New American Work, and embraces the dark, witty humor of Katchor, known for his cult classic underground comic, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer. After many years, the work is finally out on CD, accompanied by Katchor’s beautiful illustrated libretto; in a limited edition hard-bound Book+CD case.

''The Carbon Copy Building is made to be read as much as heard... [the music is] translucent and unhurried, it allows the audience to linger and contemplate Mr. Katchor’s urban otherworld.''
—The New York Times

Program note:

Brian Eno's classic album arranged for live performance by Michael Gordon (1.1), David Lang (1.2), Julia Wolfe (2.1) and Evan Ziporyn (2.2).

THIRTY YEARS AGO, Brian Eno put out Music for Airports, his first ''ambient'' album. It was the precursor for the broad spectrum of music that is today called ambient, a term Eno himself invented. It was a four-part piece for synthesizer devoid of all but the most basic aspects of song, challenging listeners to re-imagine what music might be.

TWENTY YEARS LATER, Bang on a Can All-Stars created their own version of the work with live musicians, all the while staying close to the source by sharing the project as it developed with Brian Eno. It was released on record in 1998 to wide acclaim.

THIRTY YEARS LATER, Cantaloupe Music will release a pristine live recording of Music for Airports as a digital exclusive via the Bang on a Can Store, eMusic, iTunes, Amazon, and various other digital music vendors. It will be the only Bang on a Can recording of the work available via digital download. (A limited edition CD will be available exclusively to Cantaloupe Club members.) To this day, the group frequently perform the classic work live, most recently, in the middle of the night at this past year's Bang on a Can Marathon in New York City. The Village Voice was there for the performance along with hundreds of fans and had this to say:

''It was beautiful, and best enjoyed while lying flat on your back and staring straight up, through the palm trees and the sunroof to the deep night outside, with the neighboring, towering buildings overhead appearing to curve inward around you as breathy keyboards slowly gave way to meandering clarinet.''

In the recording, the overarching calm of the piece is enhanced with touches of instrumentation behind and around its central six-note piano phrase. In the two sequences that follow the piano phrase, a choir of voices fades in and out against the sparest of sonic landscapes.

Program note:

Milan is home to the feisty young ensemble Sentieri Selvaggi, a band of intrepid composers and performers who have taken southern Europe by storm. Led by composers Carlo Boccadoro and Filippo del Corno, Sentieri Selvaggi is a collective of musicians dedicated to breaking down barriers between pop and high art, between music and theater, between the concert hall and the street.

Sentieri Selvaggi (''Wild Paths'') has already been acclaimed for their debut on Cantaloupe, for the premiere recording of David Lang’s CHILD. Among others, The Los Angeles Times spoke of their ''sheer musical energy.''

This new disc AC/DC is a collection of some of their most defining work, including premiere recordings of new works by Louis Andriessen, Laurie Anderson, David Lang, Michael Gordon, and DECCA international recording sensation Ludovico Einaudi.....

Program note:

Founded by James Poke and John Godfrey in 1989 to play at the new Dutch music festival in York, Icebreaker is a 13-piece group consisting of pan-pipes, saxes, electric violin and cello, guitars, percussion, accordion and keyboards and have have established themselves as one of the UK's leading contemporary music interpreters.

As a group of musicians that always plays amplified, they boast an exciting repertoire which encompasses some of the best known and most influential names in contemporary music today, such as Louis Andriessen, Diderik Wagenaar, David Lang, Michael Gordon, Yannis Kyriakides and Philip Glass. Icebreaker create music that appeals to contemporary classical, rock and alternative music audiences alike.

Given their unusual instrumental combination, Icebreaker represent a unique voice in British music making. This is a re-mastered release of Icebreaker's breakout 1994 recording on Argo. Terminal Velocity is a must-have for fans of modern contemporary music.

Including Michael Gordon - Yo Shakespeare; Louis Andriessen, arr J. Poke - de Snelheid; Gavin Bryars - The Archangel Trip; Damian Le Gassick - Evol; David Lang - Slow Movement

Program note:

This self-titled debut CD recording from these young mavericks of the percussion world features the recording premieres of two ground-breaking works by David Lang and Evan Ziporyn, with a unique combination of homemade instruments and those more traditionally found in the classical, rock and world music scenes.(...) Lang's ''so-called laws of nature,'' written for So Percussion, is simultaneously meditative and climactic - brought to life by So, who chose their own instruments, from giant pipes to flower pots... Consistently impressive'' - The New York Times.

Program note:

The ground-breaking Sony recordings reissued. Too funky for the academy, the Bang on a Can All-Stars emerged from the scruffy environs of downtown New York playing a new kind of music, with a new kind of energy, for a new kind of audience. This is the music that made them famous, newly packaged and remastered onto one 74- minute disc.

Music by Nick Didkovsky, Michael Gordon, Annie Gosfield, David Lang, Lois V Vierk, Julia Wolfe, and Evan Ziporyn.

Program note:

With a stunning array of slap-tongue drumming, clarinet power chords, and fuzz box-sounding multiphonics, Bang on a Can All-Star Ziporyn changes the insturment forever. An ambient/ethno/ noise travelogue. Top 10 CDs of 2001; ''One of the most seductive and musical solo CDs in recent memory'' - Bob Blumenthal, The Boston Globe

Program note:

Americans in Rome: Music by Fellows of the American Academy in Rome
Donald Berman, Artistic Director
4 CD Set

Since 1921, the American Academy in Rome has offered annual residencies to American composers at formative stages of their careers. Thirty-seven of them are represented in this four-disc set, lavishly annotated and with high standards of performance and recording. On a solo piano disc, the artistic director of the project, Donald Berman, shows great stylistic flexibility, both between pieces and within Tamar Diesendruck’s multifarious Sound Reasoning in the Tower of Babel.

The other discs feature voices, strings and winds. Among the highlights are a tantalizing fragment (in a chamber arrangement) from Roger Sessions’s operatic masterwork Montezuma, Elliott Carter’s luminous orchestrations of two early songs, Stephen Hartke’s piano quartet Beyond Words (a restrained Tallis-based meditation on 9/11) and David Lang’s coruscating Vent for flute and piano. But if you have even a passing interest in 20th-century music, you’ll want to explore this rich seam of American musical history and choose your own favourites.

-Anthony Burton, BBC Music Magazine, January 2009

Program note:

After the New Century Saxophone Quartet asked me to write a piece for them they sent me all their past recordings. I listened to them with curiosity and enthusiasm, and I heard something that totally changed my thinking about the genre. It was their recording of ''The Art of Fugue,'' by J. S. Bach. The first thing that struck me was the absolute mastery of tone of the ensemble — this music was played with such great control and discipline. It was hard not to get excited about the possibility of working with them.

What impressed me the most, however, was the monumentality of the project. There is so much light music for saxophone, music that can't make up its mind if it should be classical or jazz, if it should be serious or funny, restrained or aggressive. A lot of this music is truly enjoyable – I don’t mean to say anything bad about it. This Bach project, however, is on an entirely new level — it is asking to have the saxophone taken seriously, for all that it can do.
As a composer I immediately imagined how important for the medium it would be for a composer to take this seriousness, this monumentality into consideration, in the creation of a new work.

I started with what became the second movement of my piece, writing seemingly endless streams of notes, trying to trick the melodic and harmonic changes to emerge virtuosically from the dense fabric of the material. Somehow what I was doing reminded me of what Chopin did in his Etude, Opus 10, Number 12 – make a ridiculously fast and vaguely minor scale last forever. Chopin’s piece is of course called the Revolutionary Etude. I decided to make a set of these myself.

Revolutionary Etudes was commissioned by the New Century Saxophone Quartet, with generous support from the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, the Rockport Chamber Music Festival, the University of South Carolina, Tom Kenan, and Freda Silberman.

— David Lang

Program note:

Performed by members of the Mannheim National Theater

Program note:

[five stars] A contemporary tour de force
Maya Beiser's new recording is a sensational exploration into the world of multi-track recording. ''Mariel'' is a spiritual work, centered around what sounds like a South American folk song. ''World to Come,'' by far the largest work on this disc, with vocals and multiple tracks of cellos, is inspirational and hopeful.
-Amazon.com

Program note:

David Lang has always searched for ways to tweak classical music conventions, which is immediately suggested by such titles as Eating Live Monkeys and Cheating, Lying, Stealing. Frag is an abbreviation for fragmentation bomb, though the music is more subversive than revolutionary.

Written in 1984, the work attempts to completely demystify itself, laying bare all its technique for any listener to comprehend. The music consists of a single melodic line, presented in a sort of mutating unison by the trio of flute, oboe, and cello (the latter in very high register pizzicato). Only near the end does a simple counterpoint emerge between a pointillistic flute and a slow singing line in the other two instruments, as though a new sort of music is beginning to evolve out of the primal monophony which preceded it.
- Robert Carl

Program note:

The influence of Henze's political aesthetic and his musical dramatism can be heard in By Fire, composed in 1984 by David Lang (b. 1957).

Lang, who holds degrees from Stanford, the University of Iowa, and the Yale School of Music, numbers Henze as among his principal teachers, along with Jacob Druckman, Martin Bresnick, Roger Reynolds and Henri Lazarof. The piece, for small mixed chorus including a soprano and a bass soloist, is based on two texts sung simultaneously; one a passage from an interview with an unidentified CIA analyst describing the effect of a nuclear test on the local birds (''beautiful creatures, watching them is a wonder''), the other from Sun Tzu's The Art of War, titled ''Attacking with Fire''.

At the outset, the CIA agent's words, sung by the soprano soloist and chorus, ''outweigh'' the Sun Tzu text, assigned only to the bass solo. As the piece progresses, first basses, then tenors, and then altos and sopranos begin to appropriate Sun Tzu's words (''A state that has perished cannot be restored, nor can the dead be brought back to life'') leaving in the end only the soprano soloist with the CIA agent's recollection. Lang uses doubling as a means of ''assigning weight'' to a particular text of adding harmonic and timbral mass. Vocal lines maintain their rhythmic character throughout with recurring and registrally-fixed pitches )(i.e. lines do not develop in any sense), at a constant forte, giving the piece a voice that is insistent and poignant, a frustratedly angry plea.

Libretto
Soprano: The birds were the things we could see all the time.

Albatrosses will fly for days, skimming a few inches

above the surface of the water.

These birds have tremendously long wings and tails

and beaks that are as if fashioned for another purpose.

You don't see what these birds are about from their design.

They are just beautiful creatures. Watching them is a wonder.

That is what I did not expect.

We were standing around, waiting for this bomb to go off,

which we had been told was a very small one.

We were standing around, and the countdown comes in over

the radio, and we knew roughly where ground zero would be

and about how high.

And suddenly I could see all these birds.

I could see the birds that I'd been watching for days before,

and they were smoking.

Their feathers were on fire, and the light persisted for some time.

It was instantaneously bright, but it was not instantaneous,

because it stated and it changed in composition slightly.

Several seconds, it seemed like, long enough for me to see

birds crash into the water.

They were not vaporized. They were sizzling, smoking.

They were being consumed by the heat,

Their feathers were on fire. They were blinded.

And so far there had been no shock.

There were just these smoking, twisting, hideously contorted

birds crashing into things.

And then I could see vapor rising from the inner lagoon,

as the surface of the water was heated by this intense flash.

I've never seen anything like that.

-- interview with unidentified CIA analyst, as quoted by Robert Scheer. Used by permission.

Bass:There are five methods of attacking with fire:

to burn personnel, to burn stores, to burn equipment,

to burn arsenals, to use incendiary missiles.

Equipment for setting fires must always be at hand.

There are suitable times and appropriate days on
which to raise fires.

Now in fire one must respond to the changing situation.

When the fire reaches its height follow up, if you can.

If you cannot do so, wait.

When fires are raised upwind do not attack from downwind.

When the wind blows during the day it will die down at night.

Those who use fire to assist their attacks are intelligent.

Those who use inundations are powerful.

Now to win these battles and take your objectives but to fail to exploit these achievements is ominous, and may be described as wasteful delay.

If not in the interests of the state, do not act.

If you cannot succeed, do not use troops.

If you are in danger, do not fight.

For while an angered man may again be happy and a resentful man again be pleased, a state that has perished cannot be restored, nor can the dead be brought back to life.

-- ''Attacking With Fire'' from The Art of War by Sun Tzu,translated by Samuel B. Griffith. 1963 by Oxford University Press: renewed 1991 by Bell Nelson Griffith.

Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Program note:

LaLaLa Human Steps: Andrea Boardman, Nancy Crowley, Mistaya Hemingway, Keir Knight, Chun Hong Li, Bernard Martin, Jason Shipley-Holmes, Billy Smith, Naomi Stikeman, Zofia Tujaka

Musical composition: David Lang

Musicians: Alexandre Castonguay cello, Simon Claude violin, Njo Kong Kie piano & musical direction, Nadine Medawar vocalist

View video footage here

This two-DVD set was issued to commemorate 25 years of Éduoard Lock’s Canadian dance company La La La Human Steps. Its primary feature is a complete performance of Lock’s award-winning ballet Amelia, with music by David Lang and, in the occasional vocal sections, words by Lou Reed. This 2002 work was created specifically with the camera in mind, so the film is much more than a record of a stage performance. The dancing takes place in a sparse studio room, the floor and walls are constructed from pale wood, and costuming is simple, plain and functional. Because Lock is choreographer and filmmaker combined, the editing is geared entirely towards showing us what the dancers can do—rather than cutting in and out like a rock clip to produce a generalized sense of activity. Lock’s camera is a virtual dancer as well: zooming in from above, bringing us facial close-ups, circling other dancers, and drawing the viewer right into the middle of the action—at times, distancing us from the action as well.

So what is the action, and who is Amelia? As to the latter, I have no idea. To answer the first question, I must apologize to experts in the field (which I am not) before parading my own opinion. In his spoken commentary, Lock says the piece is simply ''about'' pure dance; indeed, it is a showcase for his distinctly individual choreographic style. Most of these extraordinary dancers move in a rapid, mechanistic way, a highly controlled frenzy, if you like. Their quick, detailed, repetitive movements suggest a compulsive ritual that is almost schizophrenic. At the top of each of the several duo sections, the two dancers (usually a male/female combo) go through this ritual before engaging with each other in a more integrated pas de deux. To that extent, the work, like much contemporary dance, is partly about how individuals relate to each other in the modern world and specifically how we tend to execute quite elaborate moves before allowing ourselves to get closer to one another (notably—but not exclusively—when there is some sexual basis to the relationship). Lock’s commentary does not expand on any of this; he is mainly concerned with how certain moments were achieved technically. To that end, the DVD includes an interactive feature whereby you can switch at certain points to see the rehearsal and filming process at work.

The dancers are all marvelous, highly trained artists in superhuman rapport with each other and completely in sync with Lock’s idiom. In one duo section, Lock turns convention on its head by pairing a statuesque, muscular woman with a petite, fluid male dancer. The word is no longer in common use—it was once a term with derogatory overtones for any piece of non-traditional art—but in the true sense of its purity, Amelia could best be summed up as ''abstract.''

Lang’s musical score mirrors the angularity of the movement in a highly accented, rhythmically propulsive language. It is tightly played by the quartet under the direction of pianist Njo Kong Kie, a further instance of the close collaborative effort which makes this work the success it is. In some sections, the live musicians add their colors to a prerecorded rhythm track.

Opus Arte’s DVD set is a quality product and a fine tribute to the dance company’s 25 years of existence—a rare achievement in a world where finance is never a given and a reluctance to reinvent yourself is always a trap. I’ll be keeping this set and I would recommend it to anyone, whether a fan of contemporary ballet or not, as an example of what may be achieved when skill and imagination combine.

—Phillip Scott, FANFARE

Program note:

In the Ocean
Directed by Frank Scheffer

Frank Scheffer's In the Ocean is unique in the genre of music documentary. With the cooperation of musicians who have never appeared before in the same film (Steve Reich, Brian Eno, Louis Andriessen), it endeavours to explain the complex contemporary music picture of the past thirty years, as well as showing how ideas move back and forth between continents. Scheffer explores the relationship between American and European composers, of how they view and influence each other. This is personified in the film by the story of Bang on a Can, one of the most popular and vital movements in music today. The founders and artistic directors of Bang on a Can are three young American composers: Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe. They represent a new generation that has established themselves as the heirs to the legacy of American composers going back to Charles Ives, John Cage, and up through Steve Reich and Philip Glass.

Music for Airports
Music composed by Brian Eno
Performed by Bang on a Can All-Stars
Directed by Frank Scheffer

During the 1999 Holland Festival, the New York group, Bang on a Can, performed thier new instrumental version of Brian Eno's ambient composition of the seventies Music for Airports. The performance was accompanied Frank Scheffer's digitally shot images of Schiphol Airport on a large overhead screen.